Specter of cost holds back drainage improvements

In the middle of the last century, Mondays were still a traditional washday in many homes in southeastern Oakland and elsewhere.

Wastewater, from sinks and toilets as well as washing machines in those communities converged through city and county drains at an outlet into the Red Run Drain in Royal Oak and thence through the drain toward the Clinton River. Sewage was held back by a dam at the outlet to the Red Run, to be sent to Detroit’s sewage treatment plant.

The dam wasn’t very high. It overflowed with only a little rain, sending raw sewage downstream.

It even overflowed on rainless Mondays.

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Oakland and Macomb counties have gotten better at preventing sewage from flowing into open drains, rivers and into Lake St. Clair. They’ve spent a lot of money to do so.

It isn’t enough.

A few weeks ago, a Harrison Township marina manager warned that sewage overflows into Lake St. Clair are erasing the gains of the lake’s burgeoning marine recreation industry.

He faults state officials for failing to end pollution, noting that if pollution escaped from his business into the lake, he’d be fined. The communities and agencies responsible for the overflows and resulting pollution have permits to do so, he complains.

He’s correct. But what he asks for seems financially and politically impossible.

Communities, together and separately, have spent hundreds of millions across Oakland and Macomb counties to reduce overflows from combined drains, the pipes that carry sewage to treatment and storm water to waterways and the lake. None of the projects were presented as a stopgap, but as something approaching the last word, the ultimate solution.

In southeast Oakland, the first project to eliminate those washday overflows cost more than $30 million when it was built in the early 1960s. Much of it was to eliminate basement flooding by relieving overloaded combined drains, but it included a higher dam, more retention.

A decade later, the area’s communities applauded a followup project, which included a larger retention basin. In the last decade, they applauded yet another, the most expensive yet, with more retention and treatment for sewage that made it past the even higher dam.

Each time, the projects were launched with the promise that things would be better.

And they are, in part. The Clinton River has seen a rebirth, supporting boating and fishing. But beaches on Lake St. Clair have remained vulnerable to occasional closure due to pollution.

Foster aired his complaints after three inches of rain swamped retention basis in both counties. Discharges included 190 million gallons of partly treated storm water and sewage from southeastern Oakland’s George W. Kuhn drain, 170 million gallons from the Milk River Pump Station at the St. Clair Shores-Grosse Pointe Shores border, 88 million gallons from the Chapaton basin in St. Clair Shores and 75 million gallons from the Martin basin nearby.

Will it ever end?

It could, perhaps, with deep enough basins. Would a billion gallons be enough? Let’s see: that could work out to a thousand feet square by – what? – 130 feet deep or so.

Or the ultimate solution: separation of combined sewers by building a separate system of sanitary sewers in communities that lack them.

That works in newer communities when both systems are built at the same time. Retrofitting remains extraordinarily expensive, and oil, salt and animal wastes flowing into storm drains are still an issue.

In Warren areas with separated sewers, scores of hidden, illegal taps deliver raw sewage into storm drains. Locating and disconnecting them is a slow, arduous task.

In any case, the counties and communities won’t consider acting without a hammer over their heads. The state is unlikely to provide the hammer. It’s too expensive, politically and financially.

Nor is the threat to tourism in Foster’s warning. So far, it isn’t heavy enough.

Robert S. Ball is a former reporter, editor and editorial writer at Journal Register newspapers.